Rotary Kiln Temperature Control Under Multiple Operating Conditions: an Error-Triggered Adaptive Model Predictive Control Solution

The temperature of rotary kiln, as one of the essential equipment in zinc smelting process, determines the product quality and resource utilization. However, since rotary kiln is a large-scale and highly coupled system, there are plenty of variables affecting the rotary kiln temperature, bringing too much redundant information to describe rotary kiln dynamics. In addition, due to the variations in raw materials, production load, and market demand, there exist various operation conditions, making it difficult to achieve stability control of the rotary kiln temperature with traditional control methods. To solve these problems, an error-triggered adaptive model predictive control (ET-AMPC) is proposed in this article. Specifically, since rotary kiln temperature is hard to regulate due to redundancy among variables and strong nonlinearity, an orthogonal maximum mutual information coefficient feature selection (OMICFS) method is first proposed to determine vital variables affecting temperature most. Then, aiming at the problem of changing operating conditions of rotary kilns, an ET-AMPC method is proposed, which can precisely adapt to different operating conditions and achieve stability control. Finally, experiments on a numerical simulation case and an industrial rotary kiln show the strength and reliability of the proposed method, which reduces 10%–20% trajectory tracking error in the period of operating condition changing and improves the control accuracy effectively.